Archive for the 'Natural areas' Category

Hopefully you’ve all been watching National Geographic’s Great Migrations and are fascinated by the idea that organisms can move, en masse, across huge distances and survive problems of predation, starvation, and weather.

However, as you find yourself engrossed in the migration stories from plankton to African elephants, don’t forget that there’s an amazing migration story happening practically in your backyard (if you live in northern Colorado or Wyoming, that is): Pronghorn Antelope (Antilocapra americana).

Pronghorn Migration

Animals belonging to the pronghorn family have been in North America for over 20 million years. Today only the species A. americana remains, and more of those pronghorn live in northern Colorado and Wyoming combined than any other place in North America.

Every fall, hundreds of pronghorn complete the second-longest migration in the Western Hemisphere: over 100 miles from Grand Teton National Park to their winter range Upper Green River Valley in Wyoming. Their summer range in the Grand Tetons is too cold during the winter, and without enough food, but Wyoming has everything they need.

Pronghorn have been making this migration for over 6,000 years. The migration corridor, 125 miles long and only 1 mile wide, is threatened by the presence of people, but pronghorn still make the trek every year, crawling under fences, crossing busy roads, and avoiding human development whenever possible.

In 2008, biologist and photographer Joe Riis was the first to document the entire pronghorn migration on foot. Watch the beautiful footage here.

One of the best places to see pronghorn in Fort Collins is at Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, just north of the city. The winter pronghorn population there ranges from 300-450 individuals. However, if you want to see pronghorn at Soapstone Prairie, you’d better hurry. The natural area closes December 1st and won’t open again until March 1st. Don’t worry, though. The pronghorn will still be there.

The Fort Collins Local History Archive has a large collection of Oral Histories taken in the early 1970s. Rosalie Kelley Remembers is a series of excerpts taken from an interview with Rosalie Kelly, a descendant of North Park pioneer families the Pinkhams and Allards, May 22, 1975.

Now I’m trying to think about different things that were interesting in Walden when I first went there. Well, I remember my first day of school. And – oh, it was an adventure to us. Guy and I had always played by ourselves. We didn’t have other kids to play with. And here were all these kids, there was eight grades and the four grades of high school in one little building. But oh, that seemed enormous to me. Now there are four, five, six buildings on that campus. That’s a regular little campus. But then, this was one school house. And a little girl that I didn’t know then, but have know all my life and she’s a life-long friend, came up and put her hands in mine – took ahold of mine and she said, “You’re a new little girl here, Rosalie. If you come out at recess with me, back behind the school house, I’ll tell you where babies come from.” (laughter) That was my memory of my first day at school. I said, “Well, you really don’t need to bother, because my mother’s already told me.” (laughter)

Another thing we enjoyed, and just had a ball when we first got there, was, if Mamma wasn’t along and Guy and I went over – we only lived about a block from Main Street – we’d run up and down those board sidewalks, so you’d hear them clatter, you know, and clang, but if she was around, there was no running on the board sidewalks.

There’s a little soda fountain in Dr. Fisher’s Pharmacy and we could go in there and for a nickel we could get and ice cream soda.

And we’d lived always on a ranch, you know, so my, that was something to get that ice cream soda.”

In this week’s exploration of our Trails of Northern Colorado natural and cultural heritage tour website, I thought we’d take a look at a wonderful little natural area that’s tucked away practically right under our noses in Old Town, Fort Collins: the Gustav Swanson Natural Area.

I’ve lived in Fort Collins for almost 25 years, and worked in Old Town for many of those years, but until I worked on the Trails project I had never heard of the Gustav Swanson Natural Area. Just over the Poudre River bridge on Linden Street, this sweet little park winds through the cottonwoods along the river and is a great place to bird watch or just relax in the shade. If you visit early in the morning, you may even see deer.

The area originally became a park in 1887, then went through several changes of fortune before becoming one of the City of Fort Collins’ natural areas in 1988. The area’s name was chosen to honor Gustav Swanson, a pioneering conservationist and head of the Fishery and Wildlife Department at Colorado State University.

So if you’re craving a break from your urban existence, a beautiful little bit of nature is waiting for you on the north edge of Old Town. Go explore!

Last month, the Museum launched our “Trails of Northern Colorado” website. The Trails website is a cultural and natural history driving tour of northern Colorado which links many of our favorite places and stories into a fun adventure, perfect for summer exploration. Many of the locations take you to our various and wonderful natural areas and open spaces, while others are more urban. Over the next couple of months, we’re going to highlight some of the stops on the tour; we hope you’ll go out and experience the rest!

Devil's Backbone Open Space (photo by Scott Bacon)

Devil’s Backbone Open Space is the southern-most stop on Tour 1 of the Trails of Northern Colorado, which covers the foothills region. Located a few miles west of Loveland, the dominant natural feature of this open space is a hogback ridge of hard Dakota sandstone. Just to the south is the Big Thompson River, and nestled in a valley to the west are stone quarries, beautiful agricultural land, and some really interesting historical stories. One of those stories involves Alfred Wild, also known as “Colorado’s Pioneer Hop Grower and Plaster King.”

Alfred Wild (photo courtesy of the Fort Collins Local History Archive)

In the late 1880s while digging an irrigation ditch on his land in this valley, Wild discovered a thick vein of high-quality gypsum. Being an entrepreneurial sort of fellow, he experimented with some small-scale methods of turning the gypsum into plaster. One thing led to another, including a partnership with the U.S. Gypsum Corporation, and Wild’s Buckhorn Mill operated until 1965.

Alfred Wild also established a successful orchard, grew hops which he sold to the country’s western breweries, and operated a brick kiln. And there’s even more to his story … so go explore, and add Devil’s Backbone Open Space to your list of “yep, I’ve done that!” as you travel the Trails of Northern Colorado.

Now that summer is here, it’s time to get serious about getting out and seeing some sights. If you live in northern Colorado, or are planning on visiting us, we’re excited to announce a new Google Maps-based driving tour that will take you to some of the truly outstanding places in our area.

“The Trails of Northern Colorado” is a website created by the Museum as part of a U.S. Park Service Preserve America grant. Literally over 12,000 years in the making, the website offers three different driving tours of the distinctive regions of northern Colorado — the foothills, the river, and the plains. Each tour consists of multiple stops, each with its own unique cultural and natural history story to tell. Taken together, the tour reveals many stories and hidden gems that even long-time residents may not be aware of.

I don’t want to give too much more away, other than to say “Go explore!” We really hope you’ll enjoy this great new resource.

The folks at Beet Street (our Fort Collins community arts and cultural organization) wrote a great blog post yesterday about a visit to Soapstone Prairie Natural Area (SPNA). They very kindly gave a shout-out to the Museum’s recently published booklet, “The Excavation of Lindenmeier: A Folsom Site Uncovered 1934-1940.” The booklet is a great resource if you’d like to know the in-depth story of this amazing archaeological site, from discovery through excavation. Although the site itself is not accessible to the public, you can visit the Lindenmeier Overlook at SPNA and get a great view of one of the most important early human habitation sites in North America.

I feel a little sheepish because we put a great deal of work into producing the booklet, and I have neglected to talk about it here on the blog! So, thank you to Beet Street’s post for giving me a reminder. The Lindenmeier booklet was part of a Preserve America grant that the Museum received in 2008. We had received our first Preserve America grant in 2006, which allowed us to conduct an extensive oral history project, interviewing over 40 people with ties to Soapstone Prairie; we produced a short video and a research report as part of that grant. For the second grant, we produced another video (“Meeting in the Center with Respect”), the Lindenmeier booklet, and a web-based cultural heritage tour guide (which will be launching soon).

Soapstone Prairie, and the Lindenmeier Site in particular, are very dear to our hearts at the Museum. We have the largest public collection of Lindenmeier artifacts outside of the Smithsonian Institution, with a fine assortment of Folsom points, scrapers, awls, and other tools on exhibit in our gallery. In 2000 we put on a major exhibition called “Dig It!” which provided a detailed look at the excavation. This story will also play a prominent role in our new museum. The story of Lindenemeier is a national treasure, and it’s right in our backyard.

The Lindenmeier booklet is available, free of charge, in our Museum Store. If you can’t swing by to pick up a copy, you can also download a PDF of the booklet from the Museum’s website. I will echo Beet Street’s blog and say, learn a little about Lindenmeier, and then get up to Soapstone. And prepared to be awed!

Folsom points from the Lindenemeier Archaeological Site on exhibit at the Fort Collins Museum & Discovery Science Center

This is the second part of a recent interview with Katie Bowell, the Museum’s Curator of Cultural Interpretation.

More to Explore: Tell us a little bit about your background.

Katie Bowell: I did my undergraduate in Canada at the University Guelph, and I wanted to be a zoologist, I wanted to be a researcher and work in a lab, until I actually got to be a researcher and work in a lab and learned that I was really, really bad at it. It’s a long process. Usually, you think of a question and then it’s a long time until you get the answer, and it’s a lot of work, and the people who can do it and do it well, that’s fabulous, but I wasn’t good at it. What I found I really liked doing was, once someone had figured out the answer to a question, I liked getting to tell people about that answer. And so about halfway through my degree in zoology, I also decided to get a degree in English, because I figured that if I wanted to tell people about stuff, I probably needed to be a good writer, a good communicator, and that seemed a way to do it.

And so I graduated, and then I couldn’t get a job anywhere. Finally I found a job at this little tiny butterfly conservatory. And I had never worked with insects, and I was terrified of insects, petrified. My mom used to tell the joke that I would never, ever walk around outside in my bare feet because the ants would get me. But I had to pay rent so I started this job as an interpreter of insects, and I got to practice what I thought I might be good at, which was interpreting and sharing information. And I actually discovered that insects were really cool, and I loved it and stayed there and became their director of education and interpretation. But I got a little tired of some of the things about the job, mainly that I was always dirty and sweaty, and there were cockroaches, and so it was fun but it was gross. So I decided, maybe I can work in a museum, because it’s clean and air conditioned and they still have animals, they’re not alive, so it’s not quite as fun, but they have fewer cockroaches, so I thought that was a good way to go.

The University of Colorado in Boulder has a natural history museum and a very good Museum Studies program that I got accepted to, with a Zoology focus, because I was very sure I was going to work in a natural history museum. I did that for two years and ended up with a really cool thesis that looked at intersections of animals and people. I looked at art installations, fine art installations, in zoos and aquariums, and what happened when you had these human-created pieces that were side-by-side with animals, how were visitors responding to it? It was a really fun study and got me interested in this intersection of content. And then someone was smiling down on me and the clouds parted, because just as I was graduating this job opened and I applied.

MtE: How will your work feed into the new museum?

KB: I think my work is going to play into the new museum in a couple of ways. One of the really exciting things we’re planning for is really highlighting those interconnections. Like the way that the processes of the river affect how people were farming here, and affect what organisms are living there and where the cottonwoods are found and why Camp Collins was first established here. We really are helping people see these connections and that really is my big focus, that every story is a part of a larger story. I think that as an interpreter, the more connections you can highlight, the more you can help connect current visitors to what you’re talking about, and the more likely they are to remember what you’re sharing with them and get excited about it. And so I’m really excited to get to continue to develop those.

We’re also continuing to work with Natural Areas, they’re going to have a space within the new museum, a dedicated visitor’s center, and I’m helping them develop that. As well we’re going to have all the outdoor experiences around the museum and the opportunity to interpret there. So that’s what I see myself doing now with it, but I’m sure that more things will pop up.

MtE: What are you looking forward to in the new museum?

KB: A window [in her office]. Well, this is the second museum I’ve ever worked in, and both of those were buildings where we had to squeeze our experiences into those spaces. With this new museum, I am so excited that we get to plan out exactly what we want, and we’re going to have room for it. And I think that that can do a lot for the visitor experience that we end up having. I am most excited for everyone else to get to see this brand-new museum, full of really neat things. And it’s really dorky, but I’m excited to watch their reactions to it. One of the things that I do here, at least a little bit, is visitor evaluations, visitor studies. I’m really curious as to how people use our spaces, how they interact with what we have on the floor, what they think about what we’re doing, because we’re a community museum, we exist for our visitors. So I’m so excited to see them seeing our new museum. I think that’s really going to be cool.